Establishing operations, cognition, and emotion.
Add establishing operations to your ABC data when thoughts or emotions swing motivation.
01Research in Context
What this study did
Rose et al. (2000) wrote a think-piece, not an experiment.
They told behavior analysts to add "establishing operations" when they talk about thoughts and feelings.
The paper says three-term contingencies alone can’t explain why a client suddenly wants something more or less.
What they found
The authors found nothing new in the lab.
They argued that EO’s link outside events to inside states, then to action.
Example: a skipped meal (EO) makes food words more powerful, so the client tries harder to get them.
How this fits with other research
Bechtel (2005) took the same plea deeper. He said we still need a middle layer that shows how an EO actually flips the brain switch.
Regaçao et al. (2025) repeat the call 25 years later, but for language. They bundle stimulus equivalence, RFT, and naming into one toolkit, just like J et al. wanted EO plus cognition.
Harte et al. (2017) give a live demo. Their rules kept kids working after the pay-off flipped—exactly the kind of stubborn rule-governed behavior that J et al. say requires an EO lens.
Why it matters
Next time a client’s motivation swings, don’t just note the behavior. Ask what changed first—hunger, praise loss, new staff? State that EO in your note and use it in your plan. You’ll write better hypotheses and faster fixes.
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02At a glance
03Original abstract
In this paper we argue that behavior analysts have tended to neglect the study of important aspects of complex human behavior, including cognition and emotion. This relative neglect has been costly in terms of mainstream psychology's perception of the field of behavior analysis and in terms of our ability to provide a more thorough account of human behavior. Observations and findings from the clinical context are offered as examples of behavior that are not readily explained by the three-term contingency, and we argue that an adequate account of these behaviors must include principles derived from recent behavior-analytic work, in particular a better understanding of the short- and long-term effects of establishing operations. The concept of the establishing operation and its implications for understanding complex human behavior are discussed.
The Behavior analyst, 2000 · doi:10.1007/BF03391996